Fights begin and end with handshakes.

I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.

Blood cannot be without dancing. There is no dancing without blood.

We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.

My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping...

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.

The taste of moon’s song.

Concrete breathes sun’s heat.

To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.

Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will...

In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.

Naming nature doesn’t tame nature.

How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?

Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.

What’s not there is.

Dew moves mountains.

So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

Sweat seems to bleed / like pride from their bones.

The ribboned gallons that rule us like beliefs rooted in single experiences.

The weight of wait.

A poet could kill the dead.

A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?

The whispers inside the red wheelbarrow’s dew.

The historic beauty of BJJ rests not with its ability to allow a smaller man to maim a larger man, but with its ability to allow any man of any size to survive.

We give up our backs and allow religious myths to apply the rear naked choke to our minds.

…real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.

The storm before the calm.

It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.

Unreality cooled reality’s burn.

There was a sound you could smell / like you were inhaling tomorrow.

If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.

Feed peace not fear, make spoon not war.

In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.

It’s too bad war gets all the attention; it’s too bad the plant is easier to see than the root.

The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.

The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.

I turn to Willa Cather’s quote: Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the...